[HN Gopher] A strange determinant - Timothy Gowers solves a prob...
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A strange determinant - Timothy Gowers solves a problem [video]
Author : dls2016
Score : 36 points
Date : 2021-04-23 15:40 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| schaefer wrote:
| I see he's using the program "write" by stylus labs[1]. It's an
| absolute favorite of mine (Especially on the ipad), and deserves
| to be more popular than it is.
|
| It's not without rough edges, but it's killer feature: You can
| quickly reflow your handwritten text to add more blank space in
| the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a paragraph, in the
| middle of your paper. Or arbitrarily reorder anything at any
| time.
|
| To me, it really is the features of the word processor finally
| come to handwritten text.
|
| [1] http://www.styluslabs.com/
| doomrobo wrote:
| This looks awesome. But wow wow wow they're serving executables
| over HTTP and the website doesn't load if you try HTTPS. I wish
| I could try this out
| c3534l wrote:
| I'm just starting this and I'm sure its over my head, but I love
| that he's cited Twitter as a source of inspiration immediately.
| klelatti wrote:
| All credit to Tim Gowers for doing this. He tweeted the quote
| "Being good at maths is being good at being stuck" from this
| video a little while ago
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kenf8E1RuoA
|
| But of course he wouldn't be doing a voice-over in a real non-
| recorded attempt to solve a problem and I think it's notable that
| he falls silent when focusing at times. Interesting that he
| solves it by sleeping on the problem.
|
| He's quite active on Twitter: a friend of mine has had some good
| debates with him on particular problems using Twitter.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Some context:
|
| Tim growers follows the pedagogical style of producing the proofs
| on the blackboard in front of you without notes. This is
| reasonably possible in the kind of pure mathematics where his
| interests lie. The idea is that it forces the kind of
| straightforward proofs which have few ideas and are mostly doing
| only the obvious thing. It also means the audience get to see
| someone actually doing it rather than just presenting some notes.
| Morally, I want to say this style is good, but I don't really
| have any idea if it's the best way to lecture something.
|
| I saw an attempt at something similar to this video--trying to
| solve a mostly unseen problem in real-time--from him about 5
| years ago. In that case it was some attempt at an IMO problem and
| I think he got stuck at the end which relied on some weird
| equivalence classes of functions which were apparently quite
| common in IMO questions at the time but hard to derive if you'd
| not seen them before.
|
| He has a reasonably popular blog at growers.wordpress.com where
| he has run some "polymath projects" which were attempts to prove
| or disprove certain conjectures through wide scale collaborative
| mathematics over the internet.
| [deleted]
| ajkjk wrote:
| * https://gowers.wordpress.com/
|
| His surname is 'Gowers'!
| yissp wrote:
| I had a combinatorics prof who taught this way, and I found it
| really effective. There's usually some key insight, and then
| you can just follow you nose through the rest of the proof.
| dls2016 wrote:
| > Morally, I want to say this style is good, but I don't really
| have any idea if it's the best way to lecture something.
|
| I think the entire point is that it's _not_ a lecture. The
| internet allows us to share a video showing how the sausage is
| made, instead of the usual "definition, theorem, example"
| cadence of what many people consider a good math lecture.
| jhncls wrote:
| Some programmers might enjoy that he introduces zero-based
| indices for these determinants.
| jonnybgood wrote:
| The OP[0] in r/math provides good description of the video:
|
| "This video is Gowers showing us that the false starts and silly
| mistakes we normal people make when first attempting a problem do
| not disappear at his "level". Watching his fumbles and
| frustrations might provide discouraged older students with some
| much-needed perspective on being "gifted", while watching him
| think out-loud might help unsure younger students learn what it
| means to "attack" a problem.
|
| Gowers fails to solve the problem in this video. He tries again a
| few hours later and succeeds in this second video[1], but then
| tries and fails to find an "elegant" proof. The next morning, he
| wakes with an idea and figures out an elegant proof in a third
| video[2]."
|
| [0]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/mwxkso/timothy_gowers...
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/frvBdaqLgLo
|
| [2] https://youtu.be/m8R9rVb0M5o
| [deleted]
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